Meteoric rise for Sahai, who works for Citigroup.
By Deepak Chitnis
WASHINGTON, DC: Neeraj Sahai, a top executive at Citigroup, has been appointed as the president of the Standard & Poor (S&P) Ratings Services, one of the largest and most renowned financial institutions in the world.
The 56 year-old Sahai, who will assume his new job on January 6, 2014, said that he is “eager to get started, to work alongside S&P’s deeply talented employees and to build on the progress [former S&P president and CEO of McGraw Hill Financial] Doug [Peterson] and the management team have achieved.”
Sahai vowed to keep up the S&P’s high standards for credit ratings and risk assessment, saying that because debt markets are in an expansionary state due to the hike in development and infrastructure projects around the world, it would fall upon the S&P to help ensure that no bad loans and credit risks and accrued.
Outgoing president Peterson believes the future of the S&P is in good hands, saying that Sahai has both the resume and skills to be “enormously valuable” to the company.
Currently, Sahai is the head of the Securities and Fund Services for Citigroup, as well as its Chief Fiduciary Officer. He has been in the financial sector for his entire career, beginning with his education. He earned his bachelor’s degree with honors in economics from the University of Delhi, as well as his master’s degree in economics from the Delhi School of Economics. He then earned his MBA from Clarkson University in New York, and also attended the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business for its Advanced Management Program.
Sahai began working at Citigroup in 1984, when he was hired as a management associate. Since then, he has served as the company’s managing director for audit and risk review, managing director for cross-border custody and securities lending, and as the head of various departments involved with transaction services and strategy implementation in India and the US.
The S&P, a division of McGraw Hill Financial, is the world’s largest ratings firm and is one of the “big three” credit ratings agencies, alongside Moody’s and the Fitch Group. Based in Manhattan, it employs roughly 10,000 employees, has billions of dollars in yearly revenue, and is the world’s number-one independent credit risk research firm, supplying millions of credit ratings every year.
To contact the author, email to deepakchitnis@americanbazaaronline.com